Paid affiliate hosting advertisement
Advertising in the Drupal.org hosting forums is now available to Drupal hosting companies. Please contact the Drupal association with the Drupal.org advertising category. Your offer will be evaluated based on the submitted Better Business Bureau reports for you company, HTML advertisement, involvement in the Drupal community, a basic security review of your service, and a proposed competitive advertising rate. The Drupal association's top priority for 2008 will be the redesign of Drupal.org and revenue from advertising will go towards that effort.
assessing hosting commpany commentary and enticements ...
The only credible commentary on hosting companies comes from those who can and do provide evidence of their hosted Drupal site, by links included their post, where their drupal.org login identity and drupal.org posting history matches with their linked site and comments. Posts like the recent one for WHB usually appear to be created by shills for the referenced hosting company. As others have noted, shared web hosting business competition has become so intense that there are shills who defame, or at least bad mouth, their competition with hopes they might entice new clients to theirs.
What is apparent from surveying hosting company sites is that most are notorious for incredibly bad service due to a variety of causes. For example, the shared hosting business appears to be a very low margin enterprise, where the primary differentiators are bandwidth and storage promises. Among the big red flags about many hosting companies are their deceptive marketing tactics. There deceptive tactics include bait and switch schemes, a sales pitches that claims a low monthly rate on the surface, which in reality requires yearly pre-payment with a very high cancellation penalty. The world of web hosting bears all the features of a cut throat business environment where the largely anonymous customers come and go with the wind.
The landscape is caveat emptor for anyone hosting a web site who can't justify or afford a dedicated service or at least VPS. The perennial adage, "if the offer appears to be good to be true", it is most likely is.
p.s. This section of the forum might benefit from visible poster IP addresses!
Well said.
A well written, and much needed post. Glad to see this topic is pinned.
IP addresses are easily changed via proxies, though. Perhaps showing post count and join date would be more useful. A lot of the more suspicious content that shows up here is coming from brand new accounts with no posting history (aside from glowing, generic testimonials for Hosting Company X, of course).
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John Forsythe
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